Blaise Agüera y Arcas

TED Talk – How computers are learning to be creative

Principal scientist at Google Blaise Agüera y Arcas spoke at the National Art Education conference yesterday in New York City. He believes that “we are on the edge of a new frontier in art and creativity – and it’s not human”. This from the TED Talk site with the recording of Blaise’s talk: Blaise works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this captivating demo, he shows how neural nets trained to recognize images can be run in reverse, to generate them. The results: spectacular, hallucinatory collages (and poems!) that defy categorization. “Perception and creativity are very intimately connected,” Agüera y Arcas says. “Any creature, any being that is able to do perceptual acts is also able to create.” 

Michelangelo said: “Every block of stone has a statue inside of it and the job of the sculptor is to discover it.” Blaise thinks that what Michelangelo understood was “that we create by perceiving and that perception itself is an act of imagination and is the stuff of creativity.”

Watch Blaise Agüera y Arcas TED talk below and google him for other talks of his recorded.